I have friends who are long distance runners and I have watched them struggle through their pain to achieve their goals. Although I used to train for both cross country and track way back in middle-school, I can no longer run. But I do understand a thing or two about the process. And I appreciate what it means to endure hardships in search of a personal reward.

Beginning a Clinical Trial

Pneumothorax Ventilation Tube

At the end of May, I began participating in a clinical trial for Poziotinib, a new targeted therapy that works on mutations in the EGFR and HER categories. Naturally, within days of my May 23rd start, I had already begun exhibiting side-effects from the new medication. The resulting rash has persisted and spread, morphing into a completely new experience for me. I thought at the time that the minor ordeal I had in preparing for the clinical trial would have been the biggest challenge of the trial itself: first I went in for a “simple” needle biopsy procedure, then I had to stay to deal with the effects when things did not go exactly according to plan. The experience even inspired an opinion piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer. But I passed over that (still relatively minor) road bump and ran headlong into the clinical trial and resulting crash back into Rashville.

Having a rash does not sound all that bad in the grand scope of things. A little salve, a dollop of willpower, and it should be easy to weather. Itching too much? Slip on some gloves or spray it with lidocaine. Rashes pass. At least it is not nausea or debilitating pain or sleeplessness. Well, at least it is not nausea. Continue reading Endurance and Payoff→

Let’s get one thing straight: emotions do not cause disease. The fault of your physical illness very likely lies with something other than you. The whole notion that anything from kidney stones to cancer could be traced back to an emotional block, repressed anger, wrongs un-righted, or any other random psychological hurt from this life or a past one, is so corrupt that it should never be given credence by any rational being. Yet throngs of people with well-intentioned sounding titles like “life coach” or “healer” spread these malicious little bits of victim blaming as if they were offering salvation in a bottle of snake oil.

That said, I want it to be clear that not everyone who identifies as a healer is guilty of either victim blaming or willfully misleading those who they are trying to help. I’ve known incredibly sincere, warm, compassionate people who do their absolute best to improve the health and well-being of others through a wide swath of tools and approaches, arguably with strong results. And, frankly, many people need some form of guidance in their lives and have relied successfully on many such “coaches” to get where they need to be. I’m not condemning whole industries or forms of practice or even job titles here; this isn’t about valid occupations, but rather about those who choose to exploit the fears and insecurities of patients under the guise of offering miraculous cures through attitude adjustment. Continue reading Emotional Illness→

Well, it’s time for another needle. I’d been successfully avoiding a lot of these for the past six-ish months, but the afatinib pill I had been taking simply wasn’t working the way we needed it to. (Which is to say, it did not stop the cancer from spreading, much less reduce its presence.) So, on this uncharacteristically rainy Southern California day, I commuted through a maze of side streets to avoid morning rush hour traffic on my way downtown to the university hospital where I am to receive today’s infusion. It’s a far cry from the cozy satellite clinic I had been accustomed to up in Pasadena. I’ve spent the better part of 90 minutes waiting for things to be prepared since I checked in; I’ve wandered the maze of the hospital, searching out a paltry offering of snacks in the lower-level cafeteria and the free coffee in the main waiting room, sitting in various rooms and surfing the free Wi-Fi (but unable to stream Flint Town on Netflix, much to my chagrin).

Here, in the Day Hospital, as it is called, the vibe is wholly different than the spa-like atmosphere of my old chemo haunt. While this is certainly clean and bright, it feels like a hospital. There is nothing aesthetically pleasing about the large room cordoned off by sliding curtains. A few windows along one wall allow a tiny amount of natural light in, but they may be closed off by curtains at any time. Yet the reception staff seems bright and friendly.

The drug I am getting today — ado-trastuzumab emtansine, or Kadcyla — is not a traditional chemotherapy, and there have been some weird holdups in getting it properly scheduled. In part, this is because my use will be slightly off-label. My insurance company refused to approve it — but they also would not deny it, leaving me in a strange limbo where other plans were difficult to make. The hospital pharmacy has been working with the drug manufacturer to cover the costs in case insurance ultimately denied coverage, and we are moving forward with the understanding that, somehow, the medication will get paid for. These concoctions are so expensive that it is unreasonable to expect that patients could actually afford to pay out of pocket, but somehow the system works to cover these costs most of the time. The trick is figuring out how. I am three weeks delayed getting in for this new treatment, which hopefully will be drastically more effective than the pill I had been taking. At least the bar there isn’t very high.

We all know — or we should all know — that lung cancer is one of the biggest killers in our society. With an estimated average of 433 people dying every day from some form of this disease, there is no question as to why it is considered such a horrifying diagnosis. Lung cancer kills more than any other cancer, and more than its three closest competitors in the cancer arena combined. If there were cancer cage matches, lung cancer would win virtually every time based on the sheer volume of its devastation and mayhem. Yet, in spite of receiving only a fraction of the research funding that other cancers get, a surprising number of treatments have emerged to help lung cancer patients outlive their initial prognosis.

But you have lung cancer! You’re expected to die. And, by the way, you’re expected to die quickly (and brutally). That is what the common narrative tells us.

Lung cancer treatment has made amazing bounds over the past decade. For a growing number of patients, living with Stage IV lung cancer is no longer an immediate death sentence, if a death sentence at all. For some of them, especially those diagnosed “earlier” in the Stage IV spectrum, while there are still a few months to alternate between treatments to find what works, or for those lucky enough to have an actionable mutation, even this advanced type of lung cancer can be treated as a chronic illness instead of a fatal one. Earlier and better diagnoses have led to younger and healthier patients having a chance to engage in this challenge before their cancer has beaten them down from within, and they have brought a new level of perseverance to the process. Continue reading The Overstayed Welcome→

It all started with a pain in my back. I was a mess. Every day, the pain grew and spread until it ran down my entire left leg and shot up into my chest. What I had hoped might be a simple pinched nerve turned out to be the result of a new metastasis in the muscle of my lower back, conveniently pressing gently up against the sciatic nerve like a feather made of barbed wire attached to a cattle prod.

To treat this nasty beast, the only practical solution was to zap it with radiation — something that I could barely wait to begin doing. By the time this was presented as an option, I was in such agony that surgery would have been appealing. Radiation, by comparison to virtually anything else, sounded like a relief. Continue reading Radiation and Me, A Love Story→

I have a predilection for skepticism, especially with regard to hyperbolic medical claims about cancer treatment. Since my diagnosis, I have received many suggestions for things to try and I have been pointed to countless articles about amazing new treatments (and plenty of old ones). Each time, there is a flutter of hope, and I want very badly to see or hear a new piece of information that is going to change the cancer treatment paradigm forever. I think that most patients and caregivers feel that way. Yet, the vast majority of information on “new” or “revolutionary” treatments being passed around via the Internet seems to fall somewhere between misrepresentation and outright fabrication.

Over the past months, I have written a number of short articles on this subject for LungCancer.net — here are links to a few of them:

As longtime readers know, I try to encourage critical thinking and hope to present a good example of that approach to information on cancer treatment options. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read and share my series of Wellness Warrior posts. (You can type the phrase in the search box for easy access.)

It takes a concerted effort, sometimes, to cut through the quagmire of nonsense out there. But if we all make that effort, together, to read beyond headlines before reacting and to vet our sources before we share, it will help to reshape the whole narrative around cancer as we know it.

If this post resonates with you, please consider supporting my work through a monthly subscription to my feed on Patreon, or a one-time donation through PayPal. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler and many otherfancy social sites or apps. Please share my posts to groups you are involved with on Reddit or Google+ or anywhere else that you feel it will help or enlighten or inspire another reader. (Sharing buttons are below the post!)

If you are anxious to get an update on my Gilotrif / afatinib treatment, you can listen to me talk about it for approximately ten minutes on my podcast, but this is a fairly busy day for me and I’ve got something far more interesting started… It isn’t every day that a person is asked to participate in a research project that could have direct ramifications for the future of cancer care across the board, much less my family or my own body.

Research Matters

Because I get my treatment through a major research institution, of which my oncologist is a key player, I’m fortunate to be considered for (or at least kept up to date on) new trials and the latest in treatment options. But today, as my session with my oncologist was concluding, he brought in a representative of a research project to ask if I was willing to participate in their study. The immediate benefit for me is that I will get a complete genomic sequencing done on my tumor. That is pretty impressive.

Sharing Data Matters

The ORIEN Total Cancer Care Protocol requires relatively low patient commitment — they have access to my existing tissue samples, which hopefully will afford enough material for them to work with, and in less than five minutes I was in and out of a quick blood draw. Now I get to sit back and see if they find anything interesting. ORIEN stands for The Oncology Research Information Exchange Network. It is all about data sharing and matching patients to precision medicine for treatment. Of course, there is no knowing whether it will turn up anything new or unique for me to try in the near future. I am looking at this more as an opportunity to be a part of something greater, that will positively affect future generations.

The research part of this study, technically under the umbrella of clinical trials, is very ambitious. It isn’t expected to reach completion until after 2036, however; I’m hoping that I’ll be around to read about their conclusions.

If this post resonates with you, please consider supporting my work through a monthly subscription to my feed on Patreon, or a one-time donation through PayPal. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler and many otherfancy social sites or apps. Please share my posts to groups you are involved with on Reddit or Google+ or anywhere else that you feel it will help or enlighten or inspire another reader. (Sharing buttons are below the post!)

I meet a lot of interesting people through my lung cancer support group. Most of them are on some form of chemotherapy. A few have tried immunotherapy. Some targeted drugs have been in the mix, along with surgery and radiation. The one commonality between them is their optimistic perseverance. But it isn’t rooted in blind optimism or faith — the whole point of the group is to share perspectives and experiences, gathering useful knowledge in the process. We all come with our own perspectives that inform our decisions and influence how we share, most of us having begun as (more or less surprised) patients that have evolved into advocates. Once in a while, a patient arrives with multiple perspectives built-in, hardwired to see her situation from both sides of the exam table.

If this post resonates with you, please consider supporting my work through a monthly subscription to my feed on Patreon, or a one-time donation through PayPal. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler and many otherfancy social sites or apps. Please share my posts to groups you are involved with on Reddit or Google+ or anywhere else that you feel it will help or enlighten or inspire another reader. (Sharing buttons are below the post!)

I recently received a kind email about my blog from Jessica Morgan, who works with a radon testing and mitigation company based in the United Kingdom. Outside of smoking, radon gas exposure is one of the more common known factors for increasing the risk of lung cancer. In the message, she asked if I would be interested in an infographic her company had created called The Dangers of Radon and its Health Effects. According to their website, radon gas exposure is responsible for approximately 1,100 to 2,000 lung cancer deaths each year in the UK. Estimates for the US suggest between 15,000 and 22,000 deaths occur annually due to lung cancers related to radon gas exposure. Clearly, this is a serious and persistent issue.

Admittedly, I don’t know a whole lot about radon gas outside of having researched to see if it was a probable cause for my cancer diagnosis. The types of structures I have lived in and the locations of my previous homes indicated that there was no likely connection between my personal lung cancer and radon gas exposure. However, it is a subject that I think is highly relevant to the greater lung cancer discussion and is an essential part of understanding that lung cancer is not simply a smoker’s disease.

Because radon gas is not one of the areas of my own specialty, I asked Jessica for some information that I could share. The following information comes directly from PropertEco Ltd, and was supplied to me by request as educational material based on their expertise in the field.

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